Seven new stories in the Fan Fiction section today (updates take more work now, because of the new comments section, so it’s easier if I do them when the batch size is smaller). Go read!

Jake ‘Evergreen98’ Billo has written an article over at the Junkyard looking at the changes in gameplay, from the release version of Halo through the current prereleases of Halo 2. If you read this, and choose to comment on it, remember that 1) the Halo 2 builds we’ve seen/heard of so far aren’t finished, and 2) Halo has been out (and playable) for almost 3 years, while the longest anyone has ever been able to play Halo 2 without signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement is about 3 hours.

Some moron is selling the domain name ‘ilovepees.com’ on eBay, claiming it is guaranteed to generate 1 million hits in the first week, due to the popularity of the ilovebees.com site. Starting bid is $1,000 and the Buy It Now price is $50,000. Personally, I have to say… if this actually sells, I hold out little hope for the human race as a whole. Thanks to Starman343 for the heads-up.

This week, the Bungie Update is not a normal update – it’s a special Bungie.net feature that covers the ins and outs of getting a game going in the European market. Typically fun Frankie read. So go read, already.

vector40 has written a series of articles on Banshee control – he’s now added a fourth segment, but this one is narrated video instead of text. It’s rather long (ten and a half minutes), but it covers several key strategy points in a way that simply cannot be duplicated with written words. If you’re looking for an edge in your online Banshee battles, this is worth watching. It’s 55 mb large, in MPEG-4 format; looks like the encoding is unfriendly to WMP9 on a PC, but QuickTime handles it on both Macs and Windows boxes. Turns out my analysis of our bandwidth situation took into account only files.bungie.org and files2.bungie.org – mythica.org still has a goodly chunk for the rest of the month, so that’s where it’s being hosted. Grab it today!

It’s Friday – I guess it must be Movie day again. Merecatfish has made another PSA for Halo CE – you can snag it off his Halocity site. (WMP9 format, 320×240, 3:51, 5.6 mb) 45 Sion has made a pretty foul-mouthed vid called ‘SouthPark MC Class‘ – WMP9 format, 640×480, 57 seconds, 5.6 mb… thanks, c0ld vengeance. Legend has made a teaser for an upcoming ‘Halo Revolutions’ film; you can find it on Halo Orbit (thanks, Oliver Sopienski). I’m not sure what it has to do with Revolutions at this point… but the sniping’s pretty good. (MPEG1 format, 320×240, 1:10, 18.8 mb) Team EP has put together a teaser for a new map they’re building (still in Alpha) – Ndugu has snowboards (with all the grinding and tricks that suggests), plus snowball launchers, pickaxes, and more. WMP9 format, 640×480, 2:29, 9.8 mb. A thread about the release can be found on the Gearbox forums. And [CHP] member Vinx has put together a long (9:25) video of gameplay on the Halo CE map New Mombasa. (It’s in WMP9 format, 640×480, and weighs in at 56 mb downloadable.) Thanks to HaloPlanet for these last two. And to people who’ve submitted movies to US for hosting – please be patient. The Going Nowhere Fast contest releases have hit us pretty hard, bandwidth-wise. We’ll be in better shape come August 1. Update: oops, one more from our own forum – scabbronumber1 posted Game Over, a 9.6 mb WMP9 that’s 4:01 worth of mostly Blood Gulch tricks and gameplay.

MarkHawk points out a new Subzero Rivalries comic – takes a shot at Halo’s AI, I think.

Stuntmutt proves that even Cortana is not immune to the corrupting influence of One One Se7en.

Halo Babies has posted their 50th strip today – and it’s a cliffhanger. There’s also some information on meeting these guys at the Halo50k Seattle event, coming up at the end of August. Go visit!

A couple of months ago, we mentioned the UXB web-based Halo server database. This has now moved to a new home at UXB’s recently launched Halo Maps website, a home for map downloads and HaloPC/Halo CE information. The site has no ads – just good, solid Halo info. Check it out!

Strato has found a Master Chief skin for UT2004; you can see pictures and grab a copy (4.8 mb) from FileFront. Nice colors!

Thanks to Wado, who was the driving force behind the new Comments solution to the Fan Fiction section. Stories will continue to be posted in the usual manner – but comments are now handled on the Fan Fiction Forum. (Each story gets its own thread, and you can either follow the ‘Read/Post Comments’ link from the story itself, or backtrack from the comments page for a given story – the first post will always have a link to the story it’s attached to.) If you want to post comments, you’ll need to register on the forum; it’s a standard phpBB install, so comments section moderators will now have far more control over abuse than the old system had. You cannot post new topics, and you cannot reply to existing ones unless you’re registered. The system went live yesterday, with no fanfare, with just the dozen or so stories posted since the Comments section was taken offline – but it now contains today’s Fan Fiction update (another 18 stories). Please read the FAQ and the Guidelines that Wado’s been so kind as to write up – and enjoy the new functionality!

Bill Daiber and his crew were another winning team in the Mountain Dew/Halo 2 contest – he’s sent us his writeup of the experience, and the pictures that won them their seats, for the fans to read. You’ll find the info in our Miscellaneous section.

A couple of days ago, we posted a note suggesting that Eric Trautmann might not have left the Halo universe entirely. An email from Eric points out that we misinterpreted the blog entry – no matter WHAT happens to his job, he won’t be working on Halo. He IS looking forward to the wedding, though. Priorities – it’s all about priorities. And he’s got good ones.

Bah. Looks like Warbow got one last Calvin and Halo into the queue before he left for the summer – and I missed it on Tuesday. It’s posted now. When you play a game, you should always think the rules through before you start.

MasterGrief points out an ‘Advertisement Campaign for Halo CE‘ over on the Halomods forum. In actuality, it’s a video made by Aztec showing gameplay on Fissure Falls – but who am I to argue? Available in high and low resolutions (bizarrely, the screensize of the ‘low-res’ version is larger than that of the ‘hi-res’ version, though it DOES have a lower bitrate). DivX-encoded .avi, 11.2 or 14.7 mb, depending on the version you grab.

Direct downloads of the Keyes winning run of our Going Nowhere Fast contest are now available; visit the GNF Status page for your choices. Quick Update on BitTorrent stats for the contest vids in general – 12,000 total downloads have been handled by the network, accounting for 1.2 terabytes over the past couple of weeks. (Our normal bandwidth needs haven’t decreased because of this contest – this number is in ADDITION to what we normally handle.) Direct downloads account for another very large chunk of bandwidth – I don’t have exact numbers, because I don’t have access to all the server logs, but I’m guessing it’s on the same order as the BT downloads. For this particular series of downloads, BitTorrent made a HUGE bandwidth requirement tolerable for our network of self-supported servers.

Last week, the Mountain Dew/Halo 2 contest ended, and a few teams got email that they’d won. Two of these teams showed up at Bungie headquarters last Saturday, and now one of the participants has written up his experience. 3 solid hours of Halo 2 netplay on Zanzibar is definitely enough to get a feel for what the game is like – and they liked. Lots and lots of details – some of these came out from folks who played at E3, but face it, it’s much harder to nail down details when you’ve only got 10-15 minutes to play. Lots of stuff, like sniper recoil or shorter melee range, point out tweaks that Bungie has added to make gameplay more balanced; folks who’ve gotten fat exploiting the old status quo will probably be unhappy, but for the average player, the game just got better. Check it out! Thanks to JNewt for the heads-up.

Halo Zone has posted a collection of ultra-hi-res screenshots; while most have been available from other sources (the 1920×1080 screen grabs from the Halo ad are new), they haven’t all been in one place before. If you want multi-thousand-pixel Halo 2 goodness, and you couldn’t be bothered to scour the web for these… visit Halo Zone, and grab them all in one place! Update: Eep – apparently this site attempts to install a suite of spyware when viewing, including Bargain Buddy and Internet Optimizer. If you’re viewing it on a Windows box, beware. Sorry about this. Thanks to P78 for the heads-up. Update 2: Problem fixed – ads removed. There should be no more trouble, according to Funkmon. (Thanks, Funkmon!)